Little flower killing game work in progress. (Zawran's renderer)

[Pixel_Outlaw]

I'm a good way into developing a classic style game in which you must kill ever growing flowers. You may move your ship along the 4 edges of the screen in order to kill the ever blooming flowers. This game uses a sofware renderer intended to provide low resolution (320x240) even when the graphics card cannot. I don't really know where to go from here with the gameplay concept. I would like the game to be over if a flower reaches the blue inner border of the screen. Also I might like to have bees come out of the flowers and fire at the player on occasion. Anyone interested in this concept?

I will admit first this this game is a product of playing many early shmups, that in essence is what I want this game to play like. If you do not enjoy those you will probably not enjoy this...

The arrows move the ship and the z button fires the ULTRA MEGA ANTI FLOWER device...

I really plan to use some old sound effects for this game. The target look and sound should feel like early 80's. Sprites shall have no more than 3 unique colors and 1 transparent channel. The idea here is to produce a simple and fun early style shmup.

Name still in progress.



*EARLY test concept*
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=323918d6ccccf8f675a4fc82078ae6c811933bc627fb67a5c95965eaa7bc68bc

[benny!]

That's already really awesome, PO. I like the growing of the flower
net a lot. And it makes fun. The 8Bit graphics are already good, too.

Is GAMEOVER when a flower reaches the border ?

Keep it up!

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Thanks, I really want to do my best to get some attention for the software renderer. This early demo is just to show how the ship moves along the screen and how the level will progress. You cannot win or loose currently. But yes, normally if a flower gets outside the "space garden" you loose. I might make insects crawl along the vines too. If the vines are destroyed with insects on them the insects die too. I still want to implement the bees that come out of flowers and buzz around the screen while firing at you. This renderer really is great for getting modern computers to run a 320x240 resolution.

[Shockwave]

Firstly I really love the concept of the plants growing, it reminds me a lot of other games in the same style, to take this on to the next stage, I would personally get rid of the square border and make it circular, this way the controls are just left and right and shoot but it will do some other stuff which will benefit you.

You can design a beautiful circular overlay for the game.
Growth has the potential of reaching any part of the border and eliminates dead areas (the corners).

To add other gameplay elements you could have enemies that attach themselves to the border which kill the player if he hits them, perhaps the player can shake them off the border somehow?
Maybe you can have different plants, some of them emmitting pollen bullets.

[TinDragon]

If you make it a circular arena it will remind people of classic games like Microbes
Your concept with the flowers growing is a cool take on the idea and it's cool to see someone using the pixmap framework to do oldskool style games, I expect Zawran wasnt thinking of that sort of thing when he made it 

[benny!]

Yeah, circular arena sounds great. Also love the idea of a bee enemy.
This game has really potentials. Please do finish it. There are way too
many unfinished projects around!

[zawran]

Nice game you got going there. And I like the flower theme. As others has mentioned, it could be expanded upon with different kinds of flowers, and insects to pester the player. Great use of the framework, didn't think anyone would use it for gaming, but I see your point in it being great for that lowres 8bit stuff.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Thanks for the ideas guys. I'm working on the sound today. I originally tried a circular arena but I felt that it was a bit too expected. I will reconsider it however. I just don't want this game to have anything else to directly compare to and I had been playing a lot of Gyruss and felt that while great and innovative for that game I wanted this to break ties with any "tube" shooter notion. Also, because of the flowers grow in rectangular formations, certain parts of the outside circle are actually closer than others. I put some time into this tought but I'm still not 100% sure I will keep it. I just wanted to show that there was some deep thought behind this square play area.

I have listened to all your thoughts and taken note. Today is for sound however so gameplay mechanics will have to come later this week when I get some time freed up.

I think the game will have a series of introductory notes for each level rather than a song. Many early games had a short little tune then the level started and the level sound effects took over. I would like to stay in line with this limitation and style choice. To do this I will probably create my own song type. I'll use one square note and a series of time triggers and pitch triggers to play each song as an array of notes. I don't have much musical training but I think I can get a little ditty out of the note array.

I really prefer this style, one man making games and doing everything. I DO plan to retouch the graphics a bit too but I must maintain simplicity to carry the current theme. I don't have any direct hardware I'm trying to emulate but I have some "feeling" I'm going for. I guess the target is around 1980-1985 arcade games.

[zawran]

I think that the rectangular playing area fits fine with the way that the plants are growing. But I would like that I only had left and right and didn't have to use up and down as well. I think it would be easier to control that way, and I'm sure you could easily make it move around the corners on its own, unless you feel its better the way it is. I'm just saying that I would prefer it simple with just the two directions to worry about, and then its fine with a rectangular area.

[Shockwave]

I'll echo Zawran here, if you keep it rectangular, please just two keys, left and right to make it go around corners

I really prefer this style, one man making games and doing everything.

Yes, it has it's own charm. It used to happen a lot on the C64 and Speccy and Vic 20. A lot of Jeff Minters games are great examples.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

It would be quite easy to impliment that 2 button style of movement too, simply store all possible positions to a 1d array and then just use the two movement buttons to make the ship move through the indicies. Yeah, I will include that option since Gyruss allows for both types and it is one of my inspiration games.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Slightly better tiles now...

Still working on getting some enemies in there but I did manage to rework the flower tiles and also add some enemy shots and level reset along with a score system...



http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=96efe44d7793d69500d27174b47c66570d761509d6163de9935cbde7375ca78c

[benny!]

Wow, really nice progress you made there. What a cool idea to
see the flowers shooting ! However, I could not shoot back - did
you disable the shooting functionality in this version ?

Anyway, some more improvements which would come into my mind:

- Player sprite should rotate depending where it is - so it always aims to the center.
- Add some explosion animation
- Internet highscore system (with a facebook plugin  )

Keep the updates coming, buddy!

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Wow, really nice progress you made there. What a cool idea to
see the flowers shooting ! However, I could not shoot back - did
you disable the shooting functionality in this version ?

Anyway, some more improvements which would come into my mind:

- Player sprite should rotate depending where it is - so it always aims to the center.
- Add some explosion animation
- Internet highscore system (with a facebook plugin  )

Keep the updates coming, buddy!

Thanks Benny. The z button should fire (I know it is hell on the German keyboards, fixing that later)

Working on the player sprite now, also explosion sprites are done and waiting to be implimented.

[Clyde]

Nice work Pixel Outlaw.

Just an Idea, maybe you can have the outter track that the ship moves on as different shapes or even circular.

It needs some kind of particle explosion, or to keep things simple an explosion animation.

It is pretty addictive, even in this early stage.